Artists, illustrators, cartoonists, photographers, and other creative individuals often use computers rather than traditional media, employing graphic art software to access, create, and edit graphic files. Their work frequently includes operations involving paths or path-like elements displayed on a viewing area. Typical operations may require application of visual effects such as brush strokes and patterns. In addition to creating and applying new visual effects to paths, an artist may need to derive some visual elements from existing ones, or to retouch, blend, mix, augment, replace, patch, remove, or replicate various effects.
An artist or illustrator may want to apply strokes or patterns or other visual effects to an existing path appearing on the viewing area of a display, or relative to a path which tracks such an existing path. Application of certain effects may require guiding a cursor using a pointing device so that the cursor accurately tracks an existing path. Manipulation of a pointing device to make a cursor track an existing path precisely can require concentration coupled with fine motor control. Maintaining such fine control of a pointing device can divert the artist's energies from essential creative aspects of a task. Accuracy can deteriorate over time as the operator of a pointing device tires. Even the most able practitioner may produce errors which require subsequent correction, resulting in lost time and perhaps frustration.
Application of visual effects may depend on tracking all or part of an existing path, or on precisely excising or selecting a portion of an existing path. Application of some visual effects can necessitate disassembling an existing path into various components, operating on each of the components, and then reassembling them in order to achieve a result based upon characteristics of the existing path, including visual features already present on the existing path. Such serial decomposition and assembly by repeated selection, cutting, and pasting, sometimes involving several different modes of operation, can be unnecessarily frustrating, tedious, distracting, fatiguing, time-consuming, laborious, or inefficient.